Some of them, for sure. All of them? I don't buy it. Show your evidence.
Also ... how confident are you that there isn't just as much benefit-from-collateral-damage among people who thrive on certainty and stability? E.g., you might have noticed that The Rent Is Too Damn High, and that governments don't tend to pursue policies that would change that, and that plausibly one important reason is that they need the votes of property-owners who see their property as a stable, reliable source of income. That's not, on the whole, a risk-seeking group, but there's a good argument that they're making money off immiserating all the non-property-owners, which is "thriving on collateral damage" if anything is.
(Which is not to say that all property-owners, or all landlords, are bad people or anything. Nor are all tech investors, or all professional poker players. That's rather my point.)
I did not mean to imply that any group had a monopoly on indifference to collateral damage, or it on them. But it has become essentially universal and (to my mind) that is an important sign of devolution.
You might want to further check with your Natenberg, maybe GP could have left out the “damage” in “collateral damage”, and strengthened “uncertainty” to “volatility”… but that wouldn’t be so poetic ;)
As memorably dramatized in the Inside Out movies, each of us is a sort of committee, and Nate’s portrayal of different people’s attitudes toward risk can perhaps give us a better understanding of our own incoherent selves and how this incoherence can be a strength.
Linking his own professional practice to psychotherapy…
Nate Silver was on Ezra Klein’s podcast recently to shill this book and it was surprisingly disappointing. I had previously thought of Silver as a careful, data-driven analyst, but he came across as an unrelatable tech bro vaguely defending Silicon Valley weirdness and MAGA tendencies. Not what I was expecting.
Nate’s take on Silicon Valley is that “to make all of this work, you need a symbiosis between two often-clashing personality types . . . risk-tolerant VCs [investors] . . . and “risk-ignorant founders.”
